Many commercial and military organizations have a plethora of paper-based drawings of electronic systems; in particular, the United States Department of Defense has literally millions of these drawings. In order to stimulate and test, or redesign a system or circuit, the information provided by the drawings must be manually extracted, interpreted, and entered to computer aided design tools. This process is incredibly time consuming and costly.
As disclosed in the Related Application, the inventors have previously designed a method of converting scanned paper drawings on electronic systems into different types hardware description languages by recognizing drawing symbols with a template matching method. However, this method requires a great deal of information to process and therefore, there exists a need in this art to reduce the amount of processing necessary to convert the scanned image into a hardware description language. The present invention fulfills this need.